Page 29 – LIFE

Her Perfect Refuge: Mae West in Vegas

November 22, 2022November 22, 2022 by Bill Syken

The combination of Mae West and Las Vegas seems like a natural match. Both made their names on crowd-pleasing raunch. She famously declared “Too much a good thing can be wonderful,” and that phrase could easily serve the civic motto of the glitzy playground in the desert.

In 1954 she opened up a nightclub act at the Sahara hotel, and LIFE photographer Loomis Dean was on hand to capture the spectacle. His pictures show West, who was born in 1893, as a woman ahead of her time. She took the stage surrounded by proto-Chippendales in loincloths, each man more ostentatiously muscled than the next. The sexagenarian woman was presented as the lord of her domain.

But the reason that West ended up in Las Vegas something less than a fantasy. She was there because Hollywood couldn’t handle her.

West had initially made her name in movies with a string of hits that brightened up the Great Depression, but that was before Hollywood censors got to work and essentially put an end to her film career.

In a director’s statement that accompanied Dirty Blonde, an episode of PBS’s American Masters devoted to West, Sally Rosenthal and Julia Marchesi recounted how West’s sexualized screen persona suffered a death from a thousand cuts:

The censors began editing her screenplays with heavy strokes, obliterating her saucy dialogue and rendering jokes senseless. For a while, West was able to work around it with double entendres and suggestive intonations, but the censors began rejecting finished films and ordering costly reshoots with their own story changes. The films grew dull; audiences grew bored. Ticket sales fell. Moviegoers opted for a bubbly Shirley Temple over a neutered Mae West. The Hollywood Reporter labeled West “box office poison,” and her film career was over.

Las Vegas offered her a chance to become her old, untamed self. And the showroom of the Sahara proved to be the perfect place to reconnect with her former audience, many of whom were now in retirement age and happy to see a performer they had enjoyed decades before.

The Vegas run proved to be a last hurrah, at least in public. When she was done with Vegas, she went for the classic Mae West ending, moving to Beverly Hills with one of the musclemen from her show, who happened to be thirty years younger than she was.

According to Rosenthal and Marchesi, she remained a relatively private person from then on:

Other than occasional television appearances – including an exceptionally popular episode of Mister Ed – West mostly kept to herself. She rarely went out during the day, to avoid the aging effects of the sun. She insisted to interviewers that she could still pass for 26, and rejected the role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, as well as roles in Pal Joey and various Fellini movies – roles that she felt would ridicule her persona and undermine her identity as a comedic sex symbol. She would eventually make two more films, under the condition that she have creative control and could rewrite her lines as she saw fit. Both films flopped; audiences were uncomfortable with the spectacle of an older woman with a voracious sexual appetite. By the 1970s, sex was no longer a taboo subject – but in presenting a post-menopausal woman with a powerful libido, West had found one last line audiences were still not ready to cross.

If she had to leave the public with a last impression, she could do worse than the one captured in Loomis’s images—that of a woman totally in command, and completely herself.

Mae West preparing to go on stage for her Las Vegas nightclub act, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (center) made her nightclub debut with loin-clothed dancers at Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (center) performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (center) and her crew of muscly dancers performed her nightclub act at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (center) performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (left) performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (center) performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (right) performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West (center) performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West performed at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Mae West backstage at the Hotel Sahara with one of the co-stars of her Las Vegas show, 1954.

Loomis Dean/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Def Leppard: Their Rousing, Rocking, Remarkable Journey

November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 by Bill Syken

The following is from LIFE’s new special issue on Def Leppard, available at newsstands and online.

It was a mighty big stage for such a risky experiment. On August 16, 1986, the seventh annual Monsters of Rock festival took place in Castle Donnington, England, in front of 80,000 fans. Def Leppard had become one of the biggest rock bands in the world with their breakthrough 1983 album Pyromania, which sold more than 6 million copies, though this popularity hadn’t fully swept their native U.K., where the record only peaked at No. 18 on the charts. At Monsters of Rock the band was slated in the middle of a bill of heavy-metal all-stars, coming on stage after Motörhead and just before the Scorpions and the headliner, Ozzy Osbourne.

Part of the reason for this placement may also have been concerns around Def Leppard’s lineup. On New Year’s Eve 1984, while the group was on a holiday break from recording, drummer Rick Allen had crashed his car on a country road, severing his left arm. But Allen trained himself to play a specially designed drum kit by using his legs to take on some of the parts usually handled by the arms.

Before Donington, the band did a quick six-date warm-up tour in Ireland. The plan was for Allen to play alongside another drummer, but after the additional player showed up late for one of the gigs, Allen handled the final two dates by himself. Now, less than 20 months after his accident, he was at Monsters of Rock before a full—extra full, in fact—audience.
The eyes of the music world were on Def Leppard, and fans and the press were skeptical that this unprecedented comeback was viable. To make things all the more challenging, it was pouring rain.

“It’s not like I could consult with a book called One-Armed Drummers,” Allen has said, noting that his physical transformation inevitably changed his style. “Everything I did I had to figure out for myself.”

Over an 11-song set, the Castle Donington performance proved to be a triumph. “Stagefright” was the (perhaps inevitable) opener, with its first line “I said, welcome to my show!” When the band played their ferocious cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band” as an encore, singer Joe Elliott introduced “Mr. Ricky Allen on the drums,” and the soggy crowd went crazy.

The next chapter of Def Leppard’s remarkable, unlikely, and highly uplifting career had begun—and though this wouldn’t be the last time the band stared down tragedy, they would ultimately emerge not only intact but bigger than ever. Their next album, 1987’s Hysteria, would surpass the heights reached by Pyromania and become one of the best-selling albums of all time. More than 40 years after their formation, Elliott, Allen, bassist Rick Savage, and guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell are Rock & Roll Hall of Famers, still topping the charts and playing to sold-out stadiums.

“The guy lost his arm in a car accident and then decided he was going to learn how to play drums with his foot,” says singer-songwriter Matt Nathanson, who released an EP of Def Leppard covers in 2018. “That is, in and of itself, a story that should carry them for the rest of their life in terms of showing their resilience and their drive and power and love of playing music together.”

Looking back on Allen’s accident decades later, Elliott described how the rest of Def Leppard never wavered in their support for their bandmate and the greater significance of the challenging crossroads in the group’s history. “We said, ‘Okay, he’s in this band until he says he isn’t.’ We’re not going to fire him because of an accident. . . . It showed the humanity within the band, the true friendship, because we’d been through some trauma before then, but this was major league.

“That was the beginning of us realizing that it’s not just a band,” Elliott added. “It’s a band of brothers.”

Here are a selection of photos from LIFE’s new special issue on Def Leppard:

Cover photography by Ross Halfin; Photo colorization by Jordan J. Lloyd/Unseen Histories

Lead songwriter and guitarist Steve Clark, bassist Rick Savage, lead singer Joe Elliott and drummer Rick Allen of Def Leppard performed at The Fabulous Fox Theater on Sept. 4, 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Tom Hill/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Def Leppard in 1983, right before the success of their Pyromania album would elevate the band into the stratosphere.

Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Phil Collen, then a recent addition to the band, showed his chops in a performance at Brendan Byrne Arena in East Rutherford, N.J., 1983.

Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty

During their Hysteria tour Def Leppard performed in San Remo, Italy in 1988.

Duncan Raban/Popperfoto

Taylor Swift took to the stage with Def Leppard in 2008 for a concert that aired on CMT.

Rick Diamond/WireImage/Getty

Def Lepppard’s Joe Elliott and Gene Simmons of Kiss shared a moment during their joint tour in 2014 after completing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in Noblesville, Indiana.

Michael Hickey/Getty

Def Leppard celebrated their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with a performance with Brian May of Queen (center) during ceremonies at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn in 2019.

Mike Coppola/WireImage/Getty

Marilyn, Arthur Miller and More: A Star Producer’s Spectacular Orbit

November 17, 2022November 16, 2022 by Bill Syken

If the distinctive name of Kermit Bloomgarden doesn’t ring a bell today, that’s to be expected. Even when he was at the height of his powers in the 1950s, he wasn’t particularly known to the general public—even if his works were.

Bloomgarden was a theatrical producer and a force behind of such enduring classics as Death of a Salesman and The Music Man, along with many other prominent titles, including The Diary of Anne Frank, Look Homeward, Angel, and Equus.

His success explains why LIFE, for a story its December 22, 1958 issue titled “People at the Top of the Entertainment World,” shone its spotlight on Bloomgarden. Wrote LIFE, “Little known to the public, Bloomgarden is unsurpassed at the complex job of choosing plays, directors, actors, and meshing them all together smoothly,”

Bloomgarden’s influence also explains the many stars that appear alongside him in the pictures taken by LIFE photographer Robert W. Kelley. Luminaries shown with Bloomgarden include actor Anthony Perkins, who starred in Look Homeward Angel before moving on to his career-defining role in Psycho. The man who Bloomgarden chose to direct Perkins in that play was George Roy Hill, seen here lunching with Bloomgarden, would go on to direct such movies as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

But the most glamorous figures in Bloomgarden’s orbit were undoubtedly Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Bloomgarden had not only produced Miller’s classic Death of a Salesman but also another play of his, A View from the Bridge, in 1955.

And Bloomgarden was connected to Monroe not only through Miller but also through her close friend Susan Strasberg, who was photographed separately by Kelley and had starred in Bloomgarden’s production of The DIary of Anne Frank. In addition to being an actress, Strasberg was the daughter of Lee Strasberg, the legendary acting coach who taught Monroe. In 1992 Susan Strasberg wrote the memoir Marilyn & Me: Sisters, Rivals and Friends.

Kelley’s photos Monroe and Miller hosting Bloomgarden in their Manhattan apartment, sitting in the living room and gathering around the piano for a light-hearted shoot. When these photos were taken, Miller and Monroe were in the middle of what would be a five-year marriage, and they look very much the happy couple. It’s telling of Bloomgarden’s position in his world that he looked very much at home with the most glamorous couple in America—even if the former accountant stayed in his coat and tie.

Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden with Arthur Miller (left) and Marilyn Monroe in their Manhattan apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Broadway producer Kermit Bloomgarden with Marilyn Monroe in her Manhattan apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe poured a drink in her Manhattan apartment with theatrical producer Kermit Bloomgarden and her husband Arthur Miller in the background, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

In her Manhattan apartment Marilyn Monroe poured a drink with her husband, playwright Arthur Miller (mostly obscured, at extreme left) and theatrical producer Kermit Bloomgardensit in the background, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Theatrical producer Kermit Bloomgarden (right) visiting with playwright Arthur Miller his wife, actress Marilyn Monroe, in their Manhattan apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Marilyn Monroe hugging her husband, Arthur Miller in their apartment in New York, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kermit Bloomgarden visited Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller at their apartment in New York, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Theatrical producer Kermit Bloomgarden visited Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller at their apartment in New York, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Theatrical producer Kermit Bloomgarden with Marilyn Monroe at her New York apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Theatrical producer Kermit Bloomgarden posed in his New York office, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Kermit Bloomgarden visited with Anthony Perkins, who starred in Bloomgarden’s stage production of Look Homeward, Angel.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York producer Kermit Bloomgarden (right) hugged actress Susan Strasberg in 1958; she played the title role in his production of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Producter Kermit Bloomgarden and Susan Strasberg, who had starred in his production of The Diary of Anne Frank, walked in New York City, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York producer Kermit Bloomgarden (center) had lunch in 1958 with director George Roy Hill (left) and playwright Ketti Frings (right), who both worked on Bloomgarden’s production of Look Homeward, Angel. The play would earn Frings the Pulitzer Prize.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York producer Kermit Bloomgarden (R) having dinner with actor Robert Preston (left, and star of Bloomgarden’s The Music Man) and his wife, actor Peter Ustinov (third from left) and actress Celeste Holm (center) at George M. Cohan Corner, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

New York producer Kermit Bloomgarden (center) auditioned dancers, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley/LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Inside Volkswagen: The Mass Production of an Automotive Icon

November 16, 2022November 15, 2022 by

Most people who have ever owned a Volkswagen Beetle or, say, an early, split-windshield VW bus or even a Karmann Ghia will swear that those uncomfortable, relatively bare-bones vehicles were among the favorite cars they’ve ever driven. They’re not for everyone, of course but for a certain breed of driver, the old-school VWs offered a rare combination of economy, ease of maintenance (this writer, stranded far from any garage, once repaired a busted accelerator cable on a ’67 bug with 12-pound-test fishing line) and, most importantly, personality that so many other mass-produced automobiles lacked.

The story of Volkswagen, meanwhile, is among the most fascinating and, in some regards, most troubling of any car manufacturer in existence. One well-documented example of VW’s paradoxical history: in its early days, during World War II, Volkswagen used slave labor (the company has admitted as much) to build vehicles for the Nazi war effort; decades later, the archetypal Volkswagens, the Beetle and the Type 2 bus, would become the four-wheeled symbols of the “peace and love” movement of the 1960s. From Hitler to hippies: not many other companies, automobile or otherwise, can lay claim to that sort of stranger-than-fiction corporate narrative.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photos made by Walter Sanders at the company’s famous Wolfsburg plant in 1951. A refugee from Hitler’s Germany himself, who fled his native country the same year VW began making cars, Sanders captures in these pictures of the factory and the factory workers a nation in the process of recreating itself. Here, in black and white, is a portrait of the labor and mechanization that would again make Germany (well, West Germany, anyway) one of the world’s most powerful economies before the end of the century.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Volkswagen’s main plant, Wolfsburg, Germany, July 1951.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Volkswagen 1951

Walter Sanders Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Volkswagen’s main plant, Wolfsburg, Germany, July 1951.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

People gathered around a VW bus, 1951.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

People gaze through the open roll top of a VW bus, 1951.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A young woman and man beside a VW cabriolet, 1951.

Walter Sanders/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An ‘Air of Abandonment’: Photos of Julie Christie, 1966

November 16, 2022November 15, 2022 by

Not long after she won the Academy Award in 1966 for Best Actress, for her role as a sexy social climber in Darling, a naturally gorgeous Brit named Julie Christie appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine, which dubbed her an “anti-goddess” for her tomboy style and no-fuss attitude.

LIFE’s Paul Schutzer had trailed Christie, then just 25 years old, as she filmed her next high-profile film: Fahrenheit 451, directed by the French New Wave auteur François Truffaut. (For unknown reasons, the shot that editors selected for the April 29, 1966, cover was not by Schutzer, after all, but by Iranian photographer Hatami.)

Making the adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel was a huge undertaking for both the British actress and her French director: Christie was pulling double duty, cast in both the lead female roles, and Truffaut—who had built his name in 1959 with the seminal Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)—was taking a risk helming his first English-language film. (It would turn out to be his last.) Still, a sense of calm and respect ruled the set, according to notes filed by Paul Schutzer: “Truffaut seldom approaches her. He uses the formal ‘vous’ to Julie as he does with everyone. Everybody’s aware of his shyness and also aware of his potential warmth. It’s anticipation of this warmth that brings out the best in his team.”

As for Christie’s own work ethic and her attitude toward her craft: “I feel no difference between me acting and not acting,” she told LIFE. “There’s only one Christie. But I know I’m never more myself than when acting, because I put all of myself into it.”

“A mere three years ago,” LIFE wrote of Christie, “she was an unnoticed bit player, and she’s still pinned to a movie contract that calls for wages like those an old-time film goddess paid her second chauffeur. Julie represents a new spectrum of actresses the anti-goddesses but do not confuse her with just any jaunty gamine frugging on the dance floor of a discotheque. On screen, as the 2,700 movie pros who voted her the Oscar know, she burns with a nervous energy that lights up the house.”

At the time of the shoot, Christie was living with her boyfriend of about three years, an artist named Don Bessant. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever want anyone but Don, but marriage it’s like signing your life away,” she told LIFE. By 1967 the couple had split, and Christie was in a relationship with Warren Beatty, who would later remark that she was “the most beautiful and at the same time the most nervous person” he had ever known.

“For men, I don’t think it’s sexiness in me that appeals to them, but an air of abandonment,” Christie told LIFE. “Men don’t want responsibilities and neither do I.”

Despite her early misgivings about marriage, Christie did eventually marry—in 2008, she and her longtime partner, journalist Duncan Campbell, tied the knot.

“There’s still one important thing for me to do: learn,” Christie told LIFE in 1966. “I’ve got so little control over myself that adrenaline simply flows. I’m awkward, the type who always does things wrong.” But what may have felt wrong to her was all right in the eyes of her peers and critics: She was nominated for a BAFTA Award the British equivalent of an Oscar for her dual performance in Fahrenheit 451, and has been an Academy Award nominee twice in the decades since.

Not all of Paul Schutzer’s photos from 1966 moody gems showing the actress on and off the Fahrenheit 451 set made it to print. Now, LIFE.com brings to light these pictures of the film icon and thinking filmgoer’s sex symbol in her prime.

ulie Christie beside costar Oskar Werner in a scene from Farhenheit 451.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie took direction from Francois Truffaut on the Fahrenheit 451 set in London, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie in hair and makeup, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie with photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, Paul Schutzer’s LIFE colleague.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I’m just in love with cinema,” Christie told LIFE. “In the theater no one in the house will forgive you if you break the spell. In cinema you can always go over something wrong—go deeper, dig further, stretch wider.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I love and adore acting, but I hate the trimmings,” she told LIFE—but Christie became a fashion icon anyway, here representing that swinging-’60s look out of London.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I’ve got something of a frustrated quiz kid in me,” Christie confessed to LIFE. “I never read enough. Novels simply don’t interest me. I like history because it’s based on facts.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie on set, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

“I arranged a fake lunch with the two of them,” LIFE photographer Schutzer wrote in his notes of creating this photo op between the very shy Truffaut (who spoke very little English) and his star Christie.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Though she called it the “greatest place for a holiday,” Christie told LIFE back in ’66 that she had no desire to work in Hollywood: “I feel very strongly European.”

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

Julie Christie, 1966.

Paul Schutzer/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock

The American Northwest: Vintage Color Photos From an Epic Road Trip

November 16, 2022November 14, 2022 by

In August 1961, LIFE magazine published an ambitious, 10-page tribute to the American Northwest with the dramatic title: “Where God Sat When He Made America.” The title of the article, LIFE claimed, was inspired by a phrase uttered by an awe-struck visitor to Glacier National Park. Now, there’s nothing unusual, cheesy or suspect about the deep emotions that grand vistas can inspire in most anyone. Teddy Roosevelt, after all, reportedly wept upon first seeing Yosemite Valley.

And we can say this about the brilliant color photographs in this gallery, shot by long-time LIFE staffer J.R. Eyerman: they’re wonderful.

When he was a boy, Eyerman took thousands of pictures in Yellowstone, Glacier and other national parks while traveling and camping with his dad. Decades later, the professional photographer spent weeks in late 1960 traveling throughout Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Washington, and even as far south as San Francisco for the magazine’s tribute to “the stunning majesty of the Northwest.”

We hope you enjoy the view.

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Yosemite Valley, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Golden Gate Bridge, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At Yosemite National Park, four bucks gathered to drink at the edge of the Merced Rover under the rock formations of El Capitan (far left) and North Dome (center, right).

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

he Grand Coulee Dam in Washington intercepted the Columbia River and sent its waters rushing down the 1,650-foot-wide spillway.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Northwest’s Pacific coast, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Roadside picnic, fall 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Driving through the famed Wawona Tree (est. 2,300 years old), Mariposa Grove, Yosemite National Park, 1960. The tree fell in 1969.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A scene from a road trip through the American Northwest, 1960.

J.R. Eyerman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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An ‘Air of Abandonment’: Photos of Julie Christie, 1966

The American Northwest: Vintage Color Photos From an Epic Road Trip

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